According to the Center, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) “wrote Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood in February, urging his cabinet agency to give ‘full and fair consideration’ to the city’s request for $81 million in stimulus money, according to a copy of the letter obtained by the Center for Public Integrity. Ironically, his letter suggested the project would create jobs, undercutting the very public argument he has made against the stimulus. ‘Carrollton’s project will create jobs, stimulate the economy, improve regional mobility and reduce pollution,’ the lawmaker wrote.”

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), too, wrote a letter asking for Department of Transportation funds for Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport: “These funds are for a specific purpose that will usher into our community a much more tightly knit transit system alternative to the private automobile. … The TIGER discretionary grant deserves your consideration within existing rules, regulations, and ethical guidelines,” he wrote.

Even Rep. Michelle Bachman (R-Minn.), founder of the Tea Party Caucus, wrote “more than a half dozen letters to federal agencies on behalf of proposed stimulus grants, including one to the Transportation Department for the St. Croix River Crossing Project that she argued ‘would directly produce 1,407 new jobs per year while indirectly producing 1,563 a year – a total of 2,970 jobs each year after the project’s completion.’”

The list goes on and on.

Correction: This post initially identified the lawmaker who wrote to Secretary LaHood as Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). In fact, it was Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas). We apologize for the error and urge the Republican caucus to diversify its nomenclature.

The Spanish-language ad shows images of a wedding and highlights Latin-American values: work, family, and children. Boxer, the announcer says, doesn’t share “nuestros valores”— our values. The ad goes on to say that Boxer “supports abortion and homosexual marriage” and that she “voted against immigration reform to permit our people to come here legally to work.” It closes by praising Boxer’s opponent, Republican candidate Carly Fiorina.

Boxer’s support for abortion and civil marriage rights for same-sex couples is well documented, and it’s not surprising, given NOM’s mission, that the organization is attacking her for it. The senator’s longstanding support for comprehensive immigration reform makes the ad’s second attack appear more questionable — and all the more like a thinly veiled attempt to manipulate the state’s Latino population into voting against her.

The language of the attack could possibly be referencing a temporary guest worker program which Boxer opposed in 2007 on the grounds that it would exploit workers, but it seems like a stretch to turn around and argue that she “voted against immigration reform.”

In response, Boxer’s campaign manager, Rose Kapolczynski, told the Center, “It’s outrageous that a wealthy right-wing outside group is running attack ads lying about Barbara Boxer’s record. The fact is that Barbara Boxer is a strong supporter of comprehensive immigration reform and has worked closely with the Latino community on everything from job creation to education.”

Eighteen months later, with no confirmation vote in sight, Sullivan says he realized “it didn’t seem likely the impasse was going to be resolved, and a confirmation didn’t seem in the offing in the foreseeable future.”

The impasse Sullivan mentions is a reference to the hold that was placed by Sens. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) on his nomination, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. McCain and Feingold weren’t so much opposed to Sullivan as they were frustrated that the Obama administration had not chosen to nominate good replacements for all the commissioners whose terms had expired. But, here, the plot grows even thicker:

Why hasn’t Obama done so? Traditionally, nominees to the FEC are presented as a pair, replacing one Democratic and one Republican commissioner whose terms have expired. The White House almost always defers to the other party’s Senate leader to select his party’s nominee. But, as Sullivan explains, there was little movement by Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell toward giving President Obama a name to replace Commissioner Donald McGahn. Rather than breaking with that tradition and risking a major fight with the Senate GOP, Obama has refrained from nominating replacements for either.

Both McConnell’s intransigence and Obama’s lack of resolve could therefore be said to be guilty in perpetuating the ongoing regulatory breakdown on FEC, but so too is the horribly time-consuming structure of the Senate confirmation process itself, notes Sullivan:

“The problem with cloture,” he says, “is not the vote but the amount of floor time it takes in the Senate.” Sullivan says “it is an incredible distraction to occupy the Senate with a nomination like mine with so many other pressing matters on the floor.” Even if cloture is invoked with approval of at least 60 senators, Senate rules provide for 30 more hours of floor debate — precious time, especially given a full Senate docket that included health care, financial services, the budget, and two Supreme Court confirmations.

Indeed, if every presidential appointee requiring Senate confirmation had to be put to a cloture vote, the Senate would hardly have time for anything else. Faced with the prospect of fighting McConnell and wasting precious floor time in the Senate too, the Obama administration apparently chose to punt on the issue instead and let the FEC soldier on in its beleaguered state a little longer.

While the Kochs are reluctant to admit any direct ties to the tea parties that have swelled across the nation, David and Charles’s efforts to promote libertarian ideas by spending more than a hundred million dollars on right-wing causes have arguably contributed more momentum to the movement than those of any other individuals:

“Ideas don’t happen on their own,” Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, a Tea Party advocacy group, told me. “Throughout history, ideas need patrons.” The Koch brothers, after helping to create Cato and Mercatus, concluded that think tanks alone were not enough to effect change. They needed a mechanism to deliver those ideas to the street, and to attract the public’s support. In 1984, David Koch and Richard Fink created yet another organization, and Kibbe joined them. The group, Citizens for a Sound Economy, seemed like a grassroots movement, but according to the Center for Public Integrity it was sponsored principally by the Kochs, who provided $7.9 million between 1986 and 1993. Its mission, Kibbe said, “was to take these heavy ideas and translate them for mass America. . . . We read the same literature Obama did about nonviolent revolutions—Saul Alinsky, Gandhi, Martin Luther King. We studied the idea of the Boston Tea Party as an example of nonviolent social change. We learned we needed boots on the ground to sell ideas, not candidates.” Within a few years, the group had mobilized fifty paid field workers, in twenty-six states, to rally voters behind the Kochs’ agenda. David and Charles, according to one participant, were “very controlling, very top down. You can’t build an organization with them. They run it.”

Citizens for a Sound Economy later split into two groups — FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity — both of which have provided direct education, training, and support to Tea Party activist groups across the nation. AFP has offerred “Tea Party Talking Points,” urged citizens to protest by sending tea bags to Obama, and provided directions to protests. It is now hosting “Defending the American Dream” summits across the county, the next one scheduled in Washington, D.C. for this Friday and Saturday. The event package includes transportation to Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor Rally” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial this Saturday.

Also of note are the strange echoes in the rhetoric of today’s Tea Party candidates of the ideas put forward by David Koch when he ran as vice-president on the Libertarian Party ticket to the right of Ronald Reagan:

Many of the ideas propounded in the 1980 campaign presaged the Tea Party movement. Ed Clark told The Nation that libertarians were getting ready to stage “a very big tea party,” because people were “sick to death” of taxes. The Libertarian Party platform called for the abolition of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., as well as of federal regulatory agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Energy. The Party wanted to end Social Security, minimum-wage laws, gun control, and all personal and corporate income taxes; it proposed the legalization of prostitution, recreational drugs, and suicide. Government should be reduced to only one function: the protection of individual rights. William F. Buckley, Jr., a more traditional conservative, called the movement “Anarcho-Totalitarianism.”

Five of the nation’s largest health insurers are in serious discussions about creating a new nonprofit group and bankrolling it to the tune of about $20 million to influence tight congressional races and boost the image of their industry.

Aetna Inc., Cigna Corp., Humana Inc., United HealthCare Inc. and WellPoint Inc. are weighing the new drive in part to shape the government regulations that will implement this year’s sweeping new health care legislation.

While the immediate goal of the insurers is to influence tight House races, the health insurance giants have a longer term agenda — influencing the regulatory roll-out of the new health insurance reform law during the next congress. Stone, again:

The insurers’ goal will be to help elect members who can be allies in the all important regulatory writing process now underway to implement key parts of the health care legislation that was signed into law earlier this year.

The sources stress that insurers are particularly concerned at this stage about a provision in the new law that mandates they spend 80 cents of every premium dollar received on the welfare of patients. The high financial stakes mean insurers have been pushing hard with state regulators to allow for broader definitions of what constitutes patient welfare expenditures. This issue is “probably the most important one right now,” explains a source.

As an added bonus, the lack of disclosure laws gives the insurers an opening to exercise their influence. By forming a nonprofit group to do political advocacy during the midterm elections, these companies could enact their agenda while keeping their names far from the fray.

Boeing, which makes the F15-E Strike Eagle jet, funded travel for at least 37 Pentagon officials between 1998 and 2007. (Air Force photo)

The drudgery of military life can be difficult to overcome at times, and so it can be helpful to decamp to new and exotic locations to break the routine. And when travel opportunities are work-related, it can take an abstemious person to resist temptation. An Army major and Walter Reed Army Medical Center doctor named Jerome Buller understandably left the dreariness of late February in Washington in 2006 for a meeting on female urology in the Bahamas, held in the city of Freeport, where the weather hovers around the high 70s that time of year.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

The cost for Buller’s five-day Bahamanian meeting, according to a trove of Pentagon travel documents obtained by the Center for Public Integrity, was $2,699. The bill, however, was footed by the Henry M. Jackson Foundation, a non-profit that supports advancements in military medicine and receives funding from, among other sources, the Defense Department. Walter Reed’s communications department did not respond for comment. Everything about both Buller’s trip and the Foundation’s sponsorship of his travel is entirely legal, as a recent Pentagon memorandum on travel benefits affirms, and it would be hard to find some kind of quid pro quo at a medical conference. But the trip is an example of the hand-in-glove relationship between private organizations that do business with the Department of Defense and the department’s employees — where, to the concern of watchdog organizations, private interests frequently open their wallets to foot the travel costs of Pentagon officials, uniformed officers and department-funded civilians in order to maintain good relationships with the Pentagon.

Boeing, for instance, is one of the largest of all U.S. defense contractors, earning billions annually from a myriad of Pentagon contracts. According to the Center for Public Integrity’s newly created online database of Pentagon travel documents, Boeing paid for at least 37 officials’ travel expenses to various locations between 1998 and 2007, including a trip by seven enlisted airmen to the 2002 Asian Aerospace 2002 Airshow in Singapore. The total cost of the trip: $12,278. Boeing produces numerous aircraft for the Air Force, including the F-15E Strike Eagle and, along with Lockheed Martin, the F-22 fighter jet that Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently canceled.

“They’re sowing seeds,” said defense reform advocate Winslow Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information of contractors who foot the bill for junior officers’ and enlisted men and women’s travel. “Some of these lieutenants and captains will be colonels and above, and they want to make sure they’ve got their hands in their pockets.”

The permissible rules also extend to foreign governments engaged in defense-based diplomacy. The Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation, for instance, spent $9,162 to send an Army lieutenant colonel on a training trip to four locations within the U.S. in late 2005. The Chinese Ministry of Defense paid $7,650 in course expenses for a U.S. Navy captain to attend the 2001 Symposium on Asia-Pacific Security in Beijing.

A 2008 memorandum, prepared by the Standards of Conduct Office within the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel, places few restrictions on trips Defense Department employees can accept from outside organizations. According to the memorandum, a “travel-approving authority” must affirm that “payment is for attendance at a meeting, conference, seminar, speaking engagement, symposium, training course, or receipt of an award or honorary degree related to official duties.” Payment can’t be accepted for an event in which “the primary purpose is marketing the non-Federal source’s products or services.” The approving authority has to certify that “a reasonable person with knowledge of all the relevant facts” would not be able to use the travel payment “to question the integrity of the Government’s programs or operations.” Cash is not an acceptable form of payment.

Ethics rules restricting congressional travel paid for by lobbyists — or organizations employing lobbyists, such as Boeing — are significantly more cumbersome. The Washington Independent’s Mike Lillis reports here on the discrepancies between congressional and Pentagon travel rules. Travel scandals ensnared several prominent members of Congress during the past decade, including former House Republican leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas).

But the rules for Pentagon travel payments haven’t received the same scrutiny. “The idea is that if you’re a member of the executive branch you aren’t pulling the purse stings,” said Laura Peterson, a national security investigator for Taxpayers for Common Sense. “You’re in a position to draw up strategy and request money, therefore you should be more immune from outside influence. But I don’t think that’s borne out in reality.” Members of the military services at senior levels routinely press members of Congress to draw up budgets that suit the services’ interests and desires, particularly when it comes to military procurement, which is a multi-billion dollar annual industry. “Anyone trying to influence the spending process will try to influence every step of the process, and that includes [influencing] the Pentagon,” Peterson continued.

Several prominent military officers and civilian officials have benefited from the permissibility of Pentagon travel rules. Adm. James Stavridis, recently tapped to become NATO Supreme Allied Commander, had the $2,100 tab picked up by Milbank & Tweed for delivering a speech at the financial services law firm’s February 2007 partners meeting. The Chinese government spent $3,600 so Adm. Dennis Blair could tour China for a week in 2001 when the Obama administration’s director of national intelligence led U.S. Pacific Command. The Association for Enterprise Integration, which boosts tech-based partnerships between industry and government, paid $550 in April 2004 so the then-head of U.S. Joint Forces Command, Adm. Edmund Giambastiani, could attend a Vienna, Va., conference on tech-enhanced warfare.

“Capitol Hill is notorious for its lax rules, and the Pentagon isn’t even using that standard,” said Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information, a former longtime congressional staffer. “Does it not bother Pentagon managers that future field-grade officers are being transported by defense manufacturers? You’d think in a strictly ethical system that would be against the rules.”

The Pentagon (Department of Defense photo)

In 2007, after passing legislation to rein in the schmoozy junkets that allowed lobbyists to buy face time with lawmakers, congressional leaders from all political walks applauded their effort as a long stride toward limiting the influence of moneyed interests over Washington policymakers.

“We have promised the highest ethical standard,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said at the time, “and we will deliver it, in an open and honest government.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

She didn’t mention that the restrictions targeted members of Congress and their staffs almost exclusively.

Nearly two years later, a new study reveals that travel by executive branch officials might merit similar scrutiny. From 1998 through 2007, Pentagon officials have been treated to at least 22,000 worldwide trips, worth at least $26 million, funded by outside groups like corporations and foreign governments, many of which have contracts or other interests before the agency, according to the study released Wednesday by the Center for Public Integrity and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Such junkets are legal as long as internal screeners grant prior approval, but government watchdog groups say there’s plenty of room for conflicts of interest.

Indeed, the analysts found cases where pharmaceutical giants treated Pentagon doctors and pharmacists to overseas trips totaling thousands of dollars each, including a $7,800 visit to Paris. (Meanwhile, pharmaceutical spending by the Department of Defense jumped nearly 300 percent, to $6 billion a year, between 2000 and 2006.) In another case, a Saudi prince picked up the $24,000 tab for a visit from Richard Millies, deputy director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, and his wife. Milles just happened to run the program that sells weapon systems to foreign governments, the report found. (Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia accounted for roughly $4.4 billion in such purchases between 2003 and 2006 alone, according to the Congressional Research Service.)

Government watchdog groups are quick to point out that the spending isn’t meant to be charity. “There’s a business reason for providing these trips to officials,” said Robert M. Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies, a Los Angeles-based non-profit research group.

The Defense Department did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Confronted with the Jack Abramoff scandal — as well as a similar CPI-Medill study detailing congressional travel trends — lawmakers took steps in 2007 to restrict lobbyist- and corporate- funded junkets. Those efforts culminated in the passage of a bill prohibiting trips of longer than one day for any organization employing a lobbyist and banning lobbyists from going along. The new law also prevents moneyed interests from shuttling lawmakers around on corporate jets and requires congressional ethics panels to OK trips 30 days in advance. Additionally, the law requires that all trips be disclosed online.

By contrast, federal rules allow outsiders to fund trips and other expenses for executive branch employees if internal screeners give prior approval. The rules indicate that the travel must be related to the employee’s normal task and not represent a conflict of interest. The records are held, in paper form, by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics.

Craig Holman, legislative representative for Public Citizen’s Congress Watch, said the difference between the limits on congressional travel and those affecting executive branch officials represents “a gaping chasm.” The federal rules might sound good on the surface, he argued, but the sheer number of internal ethics officers — some hired by political appointees — make oversight of the process almost impossible. In one case, a high-level Interior Department official under the Bush administration employed his girlfriend as his ethics officer, he added.

In another high-profile case, Nancy Nord, the acting chairman of the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission, was found to have taken expensive trips to China, Spain and San Francisco on the tab of some of the same retail manufacturers she’s now charged with regulating. Nord’s term expires in October 2012.

“This is the system of ethics we’ve got in the executive branch,” Holman said.

Holman, along with sources on Capitol Hill, said that any changes to the travel procedures for executive branch officials will likely originate with the Obama administration. The White House on Wednesday did not return a call for comment.

How soon that change occurs could have a significant effect on federal spending. Stern said the potential conflicts of interest between White House officials and special interests are potentially more glaring than those between Congress and lobbyists. “In a sense they’re even more important, because they’re the ones who make the decisions about where the money goes,” Stern said of the executive branch officials. “It’s clearly as important — and maybe more important — because no one’s watching.”

Many watchdogs are hoping that Wednesday’s report could be precisely the spark that sets the process of reform in motion. “It usually takes embarrassment,” Stern said, “before these things are done.”